Later that afternoon, I saw part four of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, which debuted at the Venice Biennale last summer. In her brief introductory remarks, Rose Lord of Marian Goodman Gallery said this was by far the largest screen on which the film had ever been shown, and it did seem odd to see the film in a plush cineplex, where viewers munched on popcorn (part five screened there the next day). The black-and-white, shot-on-HD artwork played like a filmed Pina Bausch piece: A group of attractive men and women, dressed alternately as fishermen and businesspeople, walked along a craggy coastline before wading naked into the sea. More of Fudong’s series was also on view at Sundance, but in the seemingly more appropriate “microcinema” in a dark, basement-like lower level of a Main Street shopping mall, a venue called New Frontier on Main.

Screens Here, Screens There
In addition to films, that space also contained several projection-based installations, such as Jim Campbell’s wall-mounted LED Home Movies, and Jennifer Steinkamp’s swaying Mike Kelley Trees, digitally constructed animated images originally shown last fall at a gala at the Hammer Museum in L.A., which here took on a soothing backdrop quality. According to Sundance senior programmer Shari Frilot, New Frontiers is intended to showcase how artists engage with filmic practices and the ways in which technology continues to shift the way we look at movies. “The hardware of cinematic practice is changing,” she told me. “Screens are everywhere.”

A blackout disabled the New Frontier space during Friday night’s opening reception, causing a scramble the next day, with Hasan Elahi re-jiggering his surveillance-based installation, and San Francisco-based ©ause ©ollective re-syncing sound for Along the Way, their video mosaic composed of more than a thousand separate video portraits. Since last fall, the latter has been installed as a public art project at a baggage claim at the Oakland International Airport, where it depicts the city’s diversity. Re-contextualized here, and shown at a smaller scale, the notion of place diminished, making the technique the primary feature.

Something similar happens with Doug Aitken’s New York-centric Sleepwalkers. Made for the outdoor walls of MoMA, the work shows here in a single-channel format on a large, home-theater-type screen in a black box space. In this setting it seems more like a traditional film than a place-based installation.

More satisfying than the New Frontiers installations were those artworks that appeared unexpectedly in serious-minded films. "Secrecy," a bracing documentary by Peter Galison and Robb Moss, investigates archives, information access, and their role in government control. Here art—Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s digital masterpiece The Listening Post, a dazzling display of Internet info streams (which debuted at the Whitney in 2002), and a recent Jenny Holzer projection of redacted but publicly available documents—adds texture to a film mostly given over to interviews with such figures as former intelligence officers, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporter, and a legal counsel for prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. The interviewees all speak about frightening futures and the serious threats to democracy generated by fears of terrorism. It isn’t very pretty, yet the film manages to be visually and thematically engrossing.

I wouldn’t call Secrecy an art film, but its recognition that art can and does address the same concerns as film—with a different language, but perhaps equal effectiveness—is a heartening development. It’s also an indication that cinema and contemporary art are getting closer to sharing top billing.